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The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts

The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts

Leah Price

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691114170.003.0006

This chapter looks at religious tracts and junk mail. The Victorians pioneered institutions—whether secular (the post) or religious (the tract society)—that allowed printed matter to be distributed at the expense of someone other than its end user. By disjoining owning from choosing, those transactions challenged Enlightenment assumptions about the relation between reading and identity. Where the secular press trusted print to lift individuals out of their social origin, the niche marketing pioneered by Evangelical publishers and commercial advertisers alike vested it instead with the power to mark age, gender, and class. If the content of tracts interpellated new audiences by matching characters' demographic to readers', so did the different material forms that each text took—reprinted on different paper, sold at different price points, distributed in gross and in detail.

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PRINTED FROM PRINCETON SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.princeton.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Princeton University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see http://www.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 18 February 2018